Man on Fire

36

I hug the ladder tight and turn my face from the view of the ground. Rain shingles the back of my head. Somewhere below me Ellen calls out a spooked profanity and Jolly Boy trills a stiffener to his white uncle’s nerves. I can’t move. I want to sleep here, vertical and soaked to the skin. I want to forget all the new names I’ve learned.

I feel B Pattni’s big hands on the ladder below me, anchoring it to the bed of the pick-up. The force of his grip fortifies me. That’s the plan. The neighbour’s ladder didn’t reach on its own so an appeal was made and B Pattni answered with the bright idea of standing the ladder on the back of his truck. The extra height brings the broken satellite dish within an arm’s length. A merry improvisation, in the Indian way. Safe as houses, as long as the handbrake holds.

B Pattni offered to climb the ladder for me and I had to stand my ground. It was my job. I had to suffer the spotlight glare of the crowd as I made my ascent, the neighbours come to see me make my amends and the reporters digging in for the first glimpse of Bibhuti on his feet and ever hopeful for the summoning to hear it all from the horse’s mouth, how a man among them touched the sun and came back.

They all wonder at me, how a pasty Englishman became the hand of God. I free an arm to check the screwdriver in my pocket and take another step up, barefoot for bite on the slippery metal, the paint chipping off my toenails and my strength ebbing away. I’m barely animal enough to find my grip. I have to put everything into squeezing. My slowness shames me. I shake when I lift off and scrabble for the next handhold, an unmanly spectacle for the watching cameras. I keep going because I have to. I bet myself that my last act on this continent would be something charitable. Something useful to a friend. I haul myself up as far as I can go.

At the top it’s just me and my breathing. I reach out and reel the dish in. It looks intact. Only the bracket’s broken, sheared away from the wall. I shout out my findings. B Pattni steps away from the foot of the ladder to get the replacement bracket and for a moment I’m adrift. The wait for his return is an age without the ballast that comes from other people. I keep my focus on the prayer bracelet around my wrist. Its colour has faded and it slips loosely down my arm. When I feel B Pattni’s weight engage again with the ladder I know I’ll live beyond today.

I pick my way slowly back down the rungs to meet B Pattni at the bottom. He passes me the bracket and the screws and I begin my climb again. I hope I look determined and fearless and that he’ll mention this detail when called to witness my feat to Bibhuti, who sits alone in front of a blank TV screen waiting for his connection to be restored. I lift my head to feel the rain slapping my face. It’s still warm. Up I go.

Bibhuti is pleased with me. The screen throws a bold light into the room. The picture is clear. He clicks past the cricket, prodding tetchily at the remote control buttons. He shuffles through the channels to be reunited in little bursts of recognition with each of his favourites. He doesn’t linger on the sports. The reunion is painful, a tactless reminder that the coming weeks will be spent idly and with terrible waste. To dull the torment while his bones recover he must banish all signals of the grace and power that live in the world beyond his walls.

He clucks his tongue and changes the channel. An American police procedural drama from a decade ago. His eyes glaze over and he slides back into the sofa, giving himself up to the indolence the doctor prescribed when we left the ward in a stumbling entourage.

‘You should be in bed,’ his wife chides him. ‘You will rest much better there.’

He grunts in reply and fidgets with the volume control.

The floor is sand-shifting under my feet, my legs still think they’re dangling in thin air. When I have time to reflect I’ll recall how scared I was up on the ladder, it’ll rush in like a tidal wave and sweep me away. But for now my thoughts are consumed with the logistics of going home. There are flights to book and a will to write. I have to choose which of my accumulated trinkets to bequeath and which to throw out, and that means listening again to the stories of each of them. The listening will take up most of what time remains. I’ll have to go back and put a God to every one of them before they fade away. While I was sleeping you quietly filled me. Now I’m awake and responsible. I have to go and settle things. I have to leave the place where I woke up. I have to forget my friend.

I ask him if he’s comfortable and if there’s anything else I can do for him. He waves me away, his eyes fixed on the TV screen.

Jolly Boy senses his father drifting away from him and he has an idea. Does he want to see the record, the footage is on YouTube?

The life returns to Bibhuti’s eyes and he sits up. He instructs Jolly Boy to get his laptop. Jolly Boy rushes to the bedroom, a bounce in his step, comes back with the laptop already open and whirring into start-up.

‘Come,’ Bibhuti says to me, ‘we will watch together. Jolly Boy, let Uncle sit.’ He watches with excitement as the browser opens up and the boy types a search into Google. Bibhuti Nayak baseball bat.

I look away before he hits enter.

‘It’s okay, I don’t need to see it.’

Bibhuti is confused. ‘We must enjoy these happy moments,’ he says.

‘You would not like to see what you have done?’ his wife asks. It’s a challenge. I have to face up to it. We all gather in close. Ellen takes my arm to console me. Jolly Boy hits play.

The footage is clean and crisp. The AXN cameraman must have leaked it to serve a greater good. It doesn’t do me any favours. I look like a man possessed, chopping away at Bibhuti with indecent haste, my arms swinging apelike above my head. Jolly Boy is goggle-eyed passing me the fresh bats, his face sheened with shock and pride. Bibhuti is taking every hit with a shudder that could be mistaken for torture. My actions bristle with the anxious hunger of a bird trapped in tar. I look like someone discovering their superpower for the first time in the shadow of death.

‘Lovely,’ Bibhuti coos. He looks at me with pride, the son he never wished for.

‘Uncle looks very funny,’ Jolly Boy says. He studies his own image and finds himself an improvement on the boy his friends once poked and prodded, his puppy fat now wrapped around a skeleton of steel. An accomplice in great feats, he’ll go back to class with a legend other boys will file to like ants to sugar.

‘You must be very proud of your husband,’ Bibhuti says to Ellen. ‘He did very well.’

‘I am,’ Ellen says. ‘He always tried his best.’

We could be a fever dream. I watch myself letting go on him and my skin prickles. Your eyes on me are pitying. I’m just another one of your children who lost his way in the race to see who could live the fastest.

Bibhuti crumbles and falls. The camera zooms in on his prone body. A moment of calm, then confusion sets in. A murmur winds through the crowd. Jolly Boy comes into shot and kneels down at his father’s side. He strokes his arm, gives him a gentle shake. His mother joins him. Her shakes are fiercer and she’s already gone hard as if she’s been bereaved for years. Bibhuti won’t move. The sky opens. A comment on the vain recreations of your children. Fat raindrops streak the lens, blurring Bibhuti into a memory in water of the man he was.

We stand there watching. No words come to us. We’re all friends now and what’s done is done.

Sleep comes too easily in Ellen’s bed. I float away surrounded by the things she’s brought from home. I remember the reassuring thrill when I first found myself among her laced and fragranced things, the woman-warmed garments that reminded me how I’d been chosen by another person to lead them through the dangers of the world. I feel that thrill again and yearn for those dangers. I go to sleep with the taste of her on my tongue. I sleep for us both, folding into a darkness that will flay the fat from me and leave me light enough for her to lift me on and off a fretting chair.

When I wake up the cases are packed, the little padlocks sitting on top ready for me to thread and snap shut. Ellen’s numb fingers aren’t up to the little things. I reach over to where she sits on the side of the bed and take her hand. I turn it round so the knuckles face out and run them down my cheek. It’s supposed to be playful. The scrape of my stubble is an assault on the air. She looks sad. I think she’s making a guess at how much she’ll miss the touch of a man.

‘You don’t have to keep me,’ I tell her. ‘If you don’t want to. I can go somewhere, they have places for dying in. The people there are trained, they don’t take it personally. It’ll be easier.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ Ellen says. And then she tells me a secret. It shouldn’t feel like a secret but it does. She tells me she’s never stopped loving me.

‘I went to buy you a snowglobe once. You remember that’s what I used to call you?’

I remember. I go cold. I haven’t been her secret for such a long time.

She tells me there was a toy shop in town, with carousels in the window and snowglobes in different sizes, an old-fashioned sort of place that clung on to a handmade ideal for as long as it could. She went there to surprise me. It was the day I saw her, the time we never spoke about.

‘I was looking for ages but I couldn’t find the right one. There were so many to choose from and I didn’t want to make a mistake. If I picked the wrong one it meant I didn’t know you anymore. I thought it was such a good idea, I went there all full of myself and I pictured the look on your face when I gave it to you. Things had been hard and I needed to make it right again. You’d been trying so hard.’

She bites on something painful and she’s so brave, I’m ashamed of myself for never seeing it and for everything she saw in me.

‘I gave up in the end. None of them were you. But not because I didn’t know you. They just didn’t have yours there. I would have known it when I saw it. I didn’t want to make do with something else.’

She reaches into the case and brings out a present for me, held in the palm of her hand like an offering. I take it and carefully peel the wrapping paper away. It’s one of the snowglobes I helped save from the flood, the ones with the power station inside.

‘I found it when I first got here, before I came to find you. It was in a little souvenir shop just by the hotel, you probably know it. The man had only just got them, it was the first one he put out. I don’t know why but it felt right. Something about how random it was appealed to me. Go on then, see if it works.’

I give it a jiggle. The glitter falls unimpressively. ‘It’s perfect,’ I say.

The tears fall out of her. I’ve won her back. I never lost her after all. I wrap my arms around her and let her shake. She’s enough snow for the rest of my life.

The ghosts of man and cobra are peeking through the whitewash and Harshad has been in thrall to the radio since sunrise, the swoop of a favourite ballad drawing him away from the whisky bottle that stands near-full at the far end of the counter. Everything’s working now. With nothing left to fix, his hands can be still at last. The bottle will be lifted and drained before the day is out but whenever the music plays it will soak up his sadness a little bit, insulate him against the slow crush of time passing unbrightened by a tactile and reforming love. Every day for him will be like this. I can only hope the radio keeps working so the music will come in rations enough to keep him afloat.

He stops singing when I approach the counter. He undermines me with a hateful look.

I ask him if he’s heard, Bibhuti’s awake and all is well.

He’s heard. He’s glad. But it changes nothing, I can see it in his eyes. It’s luck alone that kept Bibhuti alive. It’s luck that took his wife and his fingers and his best friend. And with luck he’ll live to see his daughter marry into the happiness he never found. There’s no telling. He just wants to be alone with his music now.

I offer my hand. I thank him, for everything. I have nothing particular in mind, I’m just being polite. I’ve been ungrateful in the past and I recognise the error of it. His mangled fingers are smooth as if from burns. I keep shaking for longer than I need to, just to let him know that nothing disgusts me anymore.

He comes out from behind the counter, picks up the cases and takes them outside. He stands on the spot where his friend used to sit and tests the weather. Hollowed out by his losses, he’s a barrel for the rain. It pours into him, pastes the wayward hair onto his head. He stands straight, his face lifted to the sky, his eyes shut tightly. For a moment it looks like he might be taken up the way the old man with the gods had hoped to be.

The blast of a car horn pulls him back down to earth. It’s Jolly Boy’s hand on the steering wheel. Laughing, he blasts the horn again, startling his mother in the back seat. He looks small behind the wheel, a spoof of a grown-up. In the passenger seat Bibhuti winds the wheel towards the kerb. At his nod Jolly Boy brakes sharply. The jolt knocks Bibhuti against the dashboard, spilling his Ganesh. He recovers and looks up at me. He taps the dial of an imaginary watch, his new relationship with pain making him impatient. It’s time to go.